To read: David Marchese profiles Benjamin Walker, the up-and-coming star of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” for the New York Times Magazine (read Amy Davidson’s Comment on the novel):

“We think of it as a period piece that just happens to have vampires in it,” is how Walker somewhat playfully describes “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” a 3-D action-horror film with an estimated budget of $70 million, produced by Tim Burton, directed by Timur Bekmambetov and based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. Walker’s description is telling. He could have simply said the movie was a popcorn picture or praised Bekmambetov’s singular gift for grisly mayhem. Instead, his description of the movie is a joke, but one defined by an earnest, conservatory-shaped perspective. “If you do too much winking,” he says of his approach to the movie, “it can make it tough to see.”

Given his earlier role as a sexy, transformational 19th-century president, Benjamin Walker may be the only actor alive for whom playing Abraham Lincoln as a vampire hunter is a more-or-less-logical career progression. “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” ran for only 14 weeks after moving to Broadway in late 2010, but Walker’s magnetic performance—in the Times review, Ben Brantley attested to Walker’s “omnisexual swagger”—was compelling enough for Bekmambetov to target him for his film. Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, says that, as Jackson: “Ben exploded in front of my eyes. At the same time as he was playing a completely credible, almost classical kind of figure, he also unmistakably had a Lower East Side hipster sensibility. It was a delicious and rare combination.” Bekmambetov, not one for subtlety in his films or speech, puts his experience of the Walker-Jackson synergy more directly. “I saw that he is a very deep and honest actor,” the director says in his heavily accented English. “And he can dance like a kung-fu fighter.”

Occasionally, there have been artist renderings and vehicle descriptions of last-seen-withs. There have been murder confessions that later proved false. There’s a man, Leland “Chug” Switzer—now in jail for killing his brother—who the RCMP feels is somehow connected to 25-year-old Nicole Hoar’s disappearance in 2002. Hoar, who’d spent a season planting trees for Prince George-based Celtic Reforestation, was waiting at a gas station on Highway 16, looking for a ride west to Smithers, where she was going to visit her sister. She hasn’t been seen since. Switzer’s property has been searched, but he’s never been charged.

Truck drivers carrying cargo to and from the port of Prince Rupert have long been mentioned as possible suspects in the highway murders, but none have ever been arrested. Then in April 2011 came a harrowing story from a 20-year-old woman who stopped near Highway 97 and Kamloops to help a unibrowed, bushy-bearded man who’d flagged her down. He tried to force her into his 1992 Dakota pickup, but fortunately she punted his nuts up into his throat and escaped. She gave a good description of the hairy guy and his truck, but like all the other leads, it has yet to prompt any arrests.